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French experts are working to establish whether the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks was among those killed in a police raid on a flat on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

Police said Abdelhamid Abaaoud was the target when officers stormed the flat in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.

The Paris prosecutor said neither he nor suspect Salah Abdeslam were among eight people arrested, but at least two bodies had still to be identified.

Meanwhile, French MPs are due to vote on extending a state of emergency.

Militant group Islamic State (IS), which controls parts of Syria and Iraq, has said it was behind the attacks last Friday, when gunmen and suicide bombers killed 129 people and injured hundreds.

The Washington Post quoted unnamed European officials as saying Abaaoud, 27, had been killed on Wednesday when heavily armed police stormed the building in the suburb of Saint Denis.

However, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins had earlier said he could not give "a precise and definitive number for the people who died, nor their identities, but there are at least two dead people".

One of the dead was a woman believed to have detonated a suicide belt as police moved in. A source close to the investigation said she could have been a cousin of Abaaoud, Reuters reported.

Mr Molins said it appeared that a "new team of terrorists" had been ready for a fresh attack.

A leader of one of the special forces units that took part in the raid said drones and robots equipped with cameras had been used to try to see inside the flat during the operation but there was too much debris. A police dog was shot dead by the militants during the operation.

Jean-Michel Fauverge told Le Figaro newspaper that when they entered the building they found a body that had fallen from the third floor to the second.